The Circle Prison management is to improve meetings between prisoners and visitors

BERHAMPUR: Prison Management System (PMS) will be launched in Circle Jail in Berhampur city in August.

The initiative is aimed at coping with the increase in the number of inmates and streamlining key business processes, district jail officials said. They said the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has taken up the task of automating and streamlining the process of moving inmates/visitors under the PMS, which is expected to be implemented within a month once the application goes live.

The PMS consists of 12 basic functional modules. More than 65 reports of various types were developed in the client/server architecture. The system was designed, tested and implemented to be as simple and user-friendly as possible. The system was also integrated with biometric tools that store biometric data of an inmate at the time of entry and are used to authenticate him at the time of movement. Officials stated that there was a need to centralize inmate data to facilitate information exchange and sharing of data with prison users.

PMS will also reduce administrative costs, speed up user response, reduce risks related to detention of prisoners and eliminate outdated processes. It will facilitate, regularize and simplify meetings between visitors and prisoners in the prison and help prison authorities in identifying/verifying prisoners using fingerprint-based identification tools. Officials said that earlier there was a manual system for arranging meetings in the prison for prisoners. There was also a lack of sharing of information about visitors in prisons and prison headquarters. Moreover, the prison did not have any provisions for identification/detection and verification of visitors. It was difficult to maintain control over the movement of visitors/mischievous elements.

There was no control over multiple meetings with a prisoner during the day/week or the number of visitors allowed to meet each prisoner. Now, with the introduction of PMS, all visitors coming into the prison to meet prisoners will be photographed and given a photo pass.